Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Ankara Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, cilt.17, sa.1, ss.23-38, 2026 (Hakemli Dergi)
This article advances a critical exegesis of Ocean Vuong's On Earth
We're Briefly Gorgeous (2020) through the prism of the new
sincerity. It elucidates how Vuong's poetics and narrative ethics
coalesce to articulate a radical understanding of vulnerability that
transcends conventional discourses of identity, trauma, and desire,
and that defies postmodern irony and cynicism. Situated at the
interstices of corporeality and language, Vuong's prose foregrounds
the body as both a site and source of meaning, deploying an
affective register that negotiates the notions of abjection, wound,
and regeneration. Engaging with the theoretical framework of new
sincerity ethic advanced by David Foster Wallace, this study
contends that Vuong's narrative enacts an extrorse orientation
toward relationality, an ethical imperative to move beyond
solipsism through a language of touch. The novel's complex
interplay of silence and speech, trans-corporeality, and queer
intimacy manifests that the ethic of new sincerity is neither
sentimental nor reductive, but intersubjective and attuned to the
liminality between presence and absence, death and rebirth, self
and other. By exploring the novel's deployment of the language of
the placenta, signifies a prelinguistic and embodied form of
communication, as the signifier of interpenetrating life and death,
the article not only situates Vuong's narrative within the lineage of
new sincerity's resistance to irony and detachment but also posits it
as a seminal intervention that reconfigures the ethics of writing,
memory, belonging and contact in queer literature. This
reorientation resonates with the movement of new sincerity writing,
which privileges vulnerability and inter-bodied kinship as modes of
ethical engagement. Vuong's novel thus exemplifies the new
sincerity ethos by transforming narrative practice into a site of
relational ethics and affective witness, demanding an embodied
reception from its readership.